THE SURPRISES OF PREHISTORY

1. If an advanced civilization did exist before those we can know of, it seems reasonable to expect that some indication would survive, furnishing a clear proof (if anything is ever completely clear in ar­chaeological research) that such a technically developed culture existed not just several but many thousands of years ago. How­ever, just as would be the case with our own civilization were it to be destroyed, most of the buildings, machines, and artifacts would decay, rust, scatter, and become unrecognizable before several thousand years had gone by. Some indications might conceivably survive if they were buried within the shifting earth, under the permafrost of the North or the Antarctic ice, or hidden on the bottom of the sea.

2. The development of the carbon 14, potassium argon, uranium thorium, thermoluminescence, dendrochronoloy (tree-ring dat­ing), and other dating processes has shaken some of our long held theories about the first dates of civilization. An iron mine in Ngwenya, Lesotho, was worked by unknown miners 43,000 years ago. Stone tools found in Iran have been given a date of 100,000 years. Large-scale copper-mining operations in northern Michigan apparently predated the Indians by thousands of years. In Wattis, Utah, a new tunnel dig into a coal mine broke into an unsuspected series of existing tunnels of unknown age. The coal found in these tunnels was so weathered that it was useless for burning. There were no Indian legends concerning such mines, nor did Indians use tunnel techniques for mining.

3. As man has explored deeper within the earth, certain tooled artifacts have been discovered contained within coal, stone, or other strata, implying an age so great that it can be only roughly calculated. A shoe print in Fisher Canyon, Nevada, embedded within a coal seam, has been estimated as being 15,000,000 years old; a print of a ribbed sole of a shoe or sandal found in sandstone rock under the Gobi Desert is thought to have been made several million years ago. Still another fossilized footprint of a sandal, un­covered in the vicinity of Delta, Utah, contained trilobites em­bedded in it, meaning that they came after the sandal print or were attached to it. Trilobites were Paleozoic marine animals that have been extinct, it is believed, for at least 200,000,000 years. A fos­silized human skeleton excavated from a mine in Italy in 1959 was surrounded by strata whose age was calculated in millions of years.

4. A piece of quartz found in California revealed that there was an iron nail inside it, completely encompassed, like the prehistoric insects preserved in amber in the North Sea. A piece of feldspar from the Abbey Mine in Treasure City, Nevada, in 1865, was found to contain a two-inch metal screw, which had oxidized but left its form and the shape of its threads within the feldspar; the stone itself was calculated as being millions of years old. In the last century at the village of Schdndorf, Austria, a small iron cubelike object, less than a centimeter in length and breadth, was dis­covered inside a block of coal which had been split open. An in­cised line forms a groove around the cube, which has- rounded edges, as if machine-tooled. There is, of course, no explanation as to what it was or how it got inside the block of coal millions of years ago.

5. At the time of the conquest of Peru there is a record that a nail was found within a rock by a Spanish-directed Indian crew within a Peruvian mine, an incident which caused consternation not only because of its apparent age but because iron was unknown in America before the arrival of the Spaniards.

6. A mastodon found at Blue Lick Springs in Kentucky was ex­cavated at a depth of twelve feet. But, as digging continued, a cut-and-set-stone pavement was found three feet deeper, under where the mastodon had been lying. This is only one instance of ancient stonework within the United States, so old that its dating by sur­rounding or superadjacent objects (as in the case of the mastodon) has not been accepted.

7. These and other cases are so difficult to explain in terms of history that many are inclined to disbelieve them entirely while others credit them to visitors from other worlds who left their footprints on our world at eras so remote that what is now solid rock were malleable and viscous areas. The possibility exists, however, that these footprints and simple Objects were made by men of extremely ancient races living on the earth and that the discoveries in mines mean that this civilization was so far back in time that only what has been hidden within the earth or preserved within other materials has so far been found, and even then not identified. One wonders how many small clues have been de­stroyed throughout the centuries with only a few enigmas re­maining to furnish any evidence of predawn civilization other than legends.

8. Legends and carved pictorial representations of extinct but recognizable animals may be another indication of the antiquity of human culture. An animal closely resembling the toxodon is de­picted on pottery found at Tiahuanaco, the two-and-a-half-mile city in the Andes of Bolivia. The toxodon, a prehistoric animal somewhat like the hippopotamus, had previously been considered to be extinct long before the development of civilized man and, in any case, his habitat was not adapted to a barren 13,500-foot-high plateau such as Tiahuanaco, nor would the Tiahuanaco area have been a likely spot for the site of a great culture, and there are indi­cations, such as cornfield terraces above the present snow line in the surrounding mountains and a deep lake containing oceanic fauna, that the entire area may have been thousands of feet lower when Tiahuanaco was built, perhaps at sea level and on the coast. On the Marcahuasi Plateau near Kenko, Peru, there are tremendous rock carvings – in some cases whole cliffs are modi­fied by carving. These pre-Inca carvings, although weathered by countless ages, can be identified as lions, horses, camels, and ele­phants, none of which are supposed to have lived in South Amer­ica during the time of civilized man. Also in Peru, llamas drawn on very ancient pre-Inca pottery found in the ruins of a coastal city near Pisco, are shown with five toes, as they once had many thou­sands of years ago, instead of the cloven hoof they later developed.

9. What appear to be dinosaurs have been discovered in petroglyphs incised on rock formations in both North and South America. But since ordinary lizards, gila monsters, and iguanas, for example, resemble their remote dinosaur ancestors, it is diffi­cult to determine whether these examples represent prehistoric monsters or ordinary lizards. This may be the case with an Indian or pre-Indian pictograph depicting a great lizard, scratched on a rock formation on Big Sandy River, Oregon. The picture, how­ever, is an excellent likeness of a stegosaur.

10. The Doheny Expedition in 1924 found petroglyphs of extreme age in the Havasupai Canyon near the Grand Canyon. One stone picture showed men attacking a mammoth, an unexpected petroglyph to be found in America, where man has usually been con­sidered, geologically speaking, a fairly recent arrival. Among other pictographs examined there was a reasonably accurate portrayal of a tyrannosaur, standing upright, partly supporting himself on his tail, exactly as later museum reproductions have shown him. Other petroglyphs along the Amazon and its tributaries show what seem to be other prehistoric animals, especially the stegosaur.

11. Near the village of Acambaro, Mexico, during the excavation of a site in 1945, clay statuettes were unearthed which have been the cause of an archaeological uproar through the years. They consist of models of rhinoceroses, camels, horses, giant monkeys, as well as dinosaurs of the Mesozoic era. (The find was further discredited since the discoverer, Waldemar Julsrud, offering to pay only for whole statuettes found, inadvertently encouraged re­productions to be made by local Indians.) Carbon 14 tests on the figurines, however, indicate that they are from 3,000 to 6,500 years old. One of the figures so closely resembles a dinosaur called the brachiosaur that, were it not for the geological eras in between, one would believe that the artist had actually seen such an animal.

12. The fact that early man drew or modeled animals that resem­bled dinosaurs is, of course, no proof that he ever saw them (although he could have seen their bones). The dragon of St. George and the dragon of China, as well as the dragon-like sir-rush, portrayed among real animals along the walls of Babylon, were scarcely physical realities. Nevertheless, certain details suggest that early man may have appeared much sooner than is commonly believed and that he dealt with some animals supposed to be extinct at his point in time.

13. Some of these survivors would be located in time in the later epochs of the Tertiary era. However, since some of the pic­tographs seem to portray reptiles of the Mesozoic era, long before the advent of man, one might suggest an intriguing explanation. If highly civilized man existed on earth in an epoch before ours, his scientific curiosity would have led him to the discovery of the for­mer presence of the Jurassic dinosaurs as has been the case with us. With the disappearance of this former civilization this knowl­edge might have been preserved through legends (of dragons) and pictographs. Again, as in the case of our own civilization, one must remember that little more than 100 years ago traditionalists ex­plained the presence of enormous fossils in the earth by claiming that God had made the fossils at the same time he created the earth.

14. Andrew Tomas, writing of historic anachronisms in his book We Are Not the First, tells of an excavated skull of an auroch (an ancient wild ox) now in the Paleontological museum in Moscow. The skull, several hundred thousand years old, is pierced on the frontal part by a small hole evidently caused by a round projectile. The lack of radial split lines, the speed and heat of the projectile, as well as its shape, suggest a bullet. The supposed bullet was not fired after the auroch's death, since investigation showed that the wound had healed some time after it was inflicted. There is an­other such example in London (The Museum of Natural History), where there is on display a human skull, found in a cave in Zam­bia, and dated as 40,000 years old, with a comparable hole on the left side, also without radial cracks. The possibilities implied by these prehistoric shootings, if such they are, are intriguing.

15. These discoveries, isolated and interpretive though they may be, point to the probability that civilized man existed on Earth much longer than was previously assumed. Without even consid­ering the possibility of civilization being brought to Earth from outer space, as has been frequently suggested, there would be time and space in the history of our own planet for one or several cultures to have developed to the point of annihilating themselves through warfare, disturbance of the environment, or of being de­stroyed by other forces which they may have unconsciously trig­gered.

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